


Duet

by bunnoculars



Category: SHINee
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27224149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bunnoculars/pseuds/bunnoculars
Summary: Jonghyun asks Taemin to sing Taeyeon's part in "Lonely."
Relationships: Kim Jonghyun/Lee Taemin
Comments: 14
Kudos: 67





	Duet

**Author's Note:**

> I mentioned this in an A/N for my WIP before, but I now have a [Twitter account](https://twitter.com/bunnoculars). If anyone would ever like to chat about Jongtae or Shinee on there, I would be happy to! :)

When Jonghyun gets his breath back, Taemin is already falling asleep on him.

“Taeminnie.”

“Mm.” And now he’s grunting at him. Only ten minutes ago he was chanting Jonghyun’s name, begging and pleading for more with each thrust, dizzy with the pleasure Jonghyun gave him, but on the other side it takes another whole minute of silence for Taemin to crack his eyes open. “What is it?”

Everything. Nothing. Anything.

“It’s only ten thirty,” is what comes out of Jonghyun’s mouth.

Instead of sliding shut again, Taemin’s eyes narrow. “You were the one who didn’t want to fuck on the couch.”

“I took you to bed, we didn’t go to bed.” There’s a clear and obvious difference, but Jonghyun buries his hand under the pillow instead of sliding it down Taemin’s body and pressing a finger to his hole as a reminder. His come has probably dribbled onto Taemin’s thighs already, and anyway, none of this is the point. “We haven’t even brushed our teeth.”

“Or showered. That’s the only way I’m getting up again.”

Taemin’s smile is too lazy to be a suggestion. Maybe he would take Jonghyun’s, if he nestled closer and played with Taemin’s fingers and kissed his skin every time he got close to drifting off, maybe then he would listen to at least half the things Jonghyun said. But he wouldn’t say anything back except mm and oh and huh, not unless Jonghyun held out long enough for them to get hard again and let go of Taemin’s hand for his dick.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” Jonghyun says, stomach twisting up. “I always want to take my time with you, but you never let me.”

“It’s your fault I came too fast.”

_It’s yours that I haven’t talked to you all day._

“Never mind.” Jonghyun turns over with a whump that sounds as stupid and dramatic as the feeling rising up inside him like a wall. He was asking for Taemin to scoot closer and slip his arm around his middle, but it’s so much worse getting what he wants. “Go to sleep, Taemin-ah.” Taemin squeezes him tight and noses into his hair, breath puffing against the nape of Jonghyun’s neck. “You said you were tired.”

“You are too,” Taemin tells him. “You need sleep more than me, hyung.”

_But I need you more than sleep._

Jonghyun got up at six a.m. today. He’ll get up at six a.m. tomorrow. He got out at nine p.m. today. Tomorrow is Monday, so he’ll get out at two—no, nine p.m. again. No more Blue Night. Shit. When he first started doing radio, having a regular schedule after years of uncertainty seemed like a blessing, but all the songs he wrote in his Man Who Composes corner feel like a curse right now, two weeks into concert prep. Every day the walls of the venue close in tighter, and his only escape is lunch with the dancer hyungs, and lunch is starving for their abs, but Jonghyun is never hungry anyway. His phone gives him the silent treatment the whole time.

Taemin does.

Jonghyun takes one long, deep breath, but his voice still comes out like _that._ “Eating and sleeping takes care of my body, it doesn’t take care of me.”

Taemin rolls away. Jonghyun doesn’t want to feel cold and lonely, he just does. He didn’t want to start a fight, either, if that’s what this is. He doesn’t want the things he wants, and he wants the things he doesn’t want, and maybe Taemin is right, maybe if he blacks out for a while he’ll wake up making sense, and.

“If you’re going to use your phone, could you get up?” Taemin says, painfully normal. “You know the light bothers me.”

“Are you mad at me?”

Jonghyun gives him two seconds to answer before he follows him to his side of the bed. Taemin stiffens at his touch, then relaxes into it, letting Jonghyun roll him back over and into his arms. Tight mouth, furrowed brow, narrow eyes, Jonghyun did all that to his face with just a few words. Taemin does so many things to his heart with no words at all.

“You’re the one who’s mad at me,” Taemin says, hand forming a fist on Jonghyun’s chest, right over it. “If you want to talk to me, just talk to me. Don’t go around in circles saying weird stuff. If you wait for me to say the right thing you’ll end up breaking up with me first.”

Almost before he can finish, Jonghyun is leaning in to kiss those words off his lips. Taemin makes this low cut-off sound, nipping at Jonghyun as he lifts away, dragging, “Taemin-ah,” out of him.

“What?” Taemin says, not-smiling. “If you don’t tell me this time, I’ll break up with you.”

Taemin has to stop saying that if he wants Jonghyun to reply without kissing him first, soft and slow this time, until Taemin melts in his arms and his eyes slide shut and his tongue traces the line of Jonghyun’s mouth, lost between a smile and a frown. When Jonghyun lifts away Taemin’s eyes are just as dark and just as fixed on his face, and his heart is no better off than it was before, and now he has to say it.

_I miss you. Even right now, I still miss you. I think about you all day and all night. Tell me you think about me, too, not just dirty things. Nice things. Sweet things. Good things, even bad things. Random things that don’t mean anything._

“Sing Taeyeon noona’s part in ‘Lonely.’” That. Jonghyun can’t bear to leave it hanging in the air between them, saying in a rush, “For my concert. Noona can’t do it, she’s busy.”

For the longest time, so long Jonghyun lives and dies and the urge to lie and say _I just want an excuse to see you_ and roll over and curl up and hide from Taemin’s softness and warmth grows and grows and grows, Taemin just looks at him.

“Why me?”

How is that even a question? They’ve been lying naked in bed together for so many years that it’s normal, but Jonghyun’s heart still beats so fast when he holds Taemin it feels like he can’t breathe sometimes.

“Because you’re you.”

But because he’s Taemin, he doesn’t smile and lean in for another kiss, he says the one thing Jonghyun doesn’t want to hear. “It’d look weird, hyung. Ask one of the other noonas.”

“There’s nothing weird about us, and I don’t care how it looks.”

And that’s not an answer. Taemin could have just said no, and he could stop looking at Jonghyun like he’s being stupid on purpose.

“It’s a concert, hyung, how it looks is the whole point.”

“Fine. I like how it looks. How we look together. I don’t care if other people don’t.”

Taemin’s features give suddenly, or maybe it was so slow it only seemed that way to Jonghyun. Maybe after all this time, all the glances he’s stolen at him, the dates he’s stared across the table at him, the nights like this he’s lain awake staring into Taemin’s face, there are still tells he doesn’t know to look for. And this is an expression he’s never seen.

“That’s not what the song makes it sound like.” A voice he’s never heard. “It’s about me, right?”

Yes. No. Somehow both of them feel like a lie. Or maybe the look Taemin is giving him makes Jonghyun feel like a liar.

“You don’t want it to be?”

It hurts so much more than it should to get those words out, and waiting for Taemin’s answer is somehow worse than answering Taemin would have been, but Taemin doesn’t even blink. “No.”

Jonghyun doesn’t know if that’s what he wanted to hear, just that he shouldn’t want to hear anything but Taemin’s voice. Whatever Taemin says with it. Somehow they’re talking about this. Really talking. Taemin is still looking him in the eye, lying here in his arms, breathing with him as he waits for Jonghyun to say something back.

Jonghyun slips his hand down between them to find Taemin’s, lacing their fingers together and holding on tight. “You never feel lonely when you’re with me?”

“No.”

“It makes me lonely when you lie like that.”

Taemin makes a face at him, but his expression warps almost as it forms, and before Jonghyun can stop himself he’s reaching up with his other hand to comb his hair back. Taemin lets him do it, but it doesn’t stop him from saying, “I always thought you knew me better than anyone, but I guess you don’t know me at all.”

Jonghyun’s heart falters. His strokes don’t. “Knowing and understanding are two different things, Taeminnie.”

Taemin should know that as well as him. He’s been in Jonghyun’s life longer than anyone besides his family, and he’s spent all that time telling Jonghyun he doesn’t make any sense.

And somehow it’s just as cute when he tells Jonghyun now, “You’re more like Taeyeon noona’s part than me, maybe I should sing yours and you can have hers.”

He’s not wrong, but he’s not right, either. Jonghyun’s heart is hurting either way. When Taemin squeezes his hand, Jonghyun squeezes back.

“I tell you things.”

Taemin takes that in, and says back, “Tell me something now.”

“I don’t like it when you go to sleep right after sex.”

There. Jonghyun said it.

“I don’t get how I’m supposed to talk when there’s nothing to say.”

And Taemin did too.

“I don’t like that you have nothing to say.”

Taemin makes another face at him. This one sticks, even after Jonghyun slips his hand down out of his hair to pinch his cheek. “Then you don’t like me.”

Even after Jonghyun kisses him again, kisses him and kisses him and kisses him, his cheeks and his forehead and his nose and his chin, right up until Taemin catches his bottom lip between his teeth and presses his mouth to his. Jonghyun feels his smile form against his lips, and he only draws away so that he can see it. Bright and happy and beautiful, the Taemin he’s always known. Maybe the Taemin he always wanted to see, too, but not anymore, not for a long time. There are so many other sides of him, so many secrets Jonghyun doesn’t know, memories he doesn’t share, things he thinks and feels and wants, things he forgets that Jonghyun would remember, things he remembers that Jonghyun shouldn’t have forgotten.

“The things you think of as nothing are everything to me, Taemin-ah,” Jonghyun says. “It doesn’t have to be anything important, or interesting, or anything. Just let me in, just a little.”

“You always say everything but the important things. I want to hear about them.” Taemin struggles with himself for a second, before adding in a rush, “Not if you ate or slept. The things I don’t know to ask about.”

The parts of Jonghyun he’s never shown Taemin since they first met, in other words. The things too dark for Taemin to see. Jonghyun had so many reasons to hide behind back when he was a hyung and not a boyfriend, but now that he’s both and Taemin is twenty-five, none of them mean what they used to. They’re only excuses.

Saying it is like stepping out into nothing, but Jonghyun holds on tight to Taemin’s hand. “I’m really tired.”

Taemin’s face goes strange, on the verge of yelling at Jonghyun or laughing at him or kissing him senseless, before he lets Jonghyun go to brush his thumb over the circle under one of Jonghyun’s eyes. “But I’m not supposed to tell you to sleep. Hyung~”

“I need you more than that,” is another thing Jonghyun is never supposed to say, except it’s one he says all the time. Taemin lets him get away with it, folding him into his arms and holding him tight, so soft and warm and close that everything inside Jonghyun might come up if he’s not careful. All his feelings, all over Taemin.

“It’s not just your body, right?” Taemin rubs his tiny hand over Jonghyun’s back, clumsy and gentle. “Your heart.”

“Mm.”

“I love you,” Taemin tells him.

“I know.”

Taemin squeezes him even tighter, somehow. “It’s because I do that I don’t want to sing that song. I don’t want it to be about us.”

“I know.” At least he does now. He takes one long, deep breath. “It’s not just you and me. It’s about a lot of different people. Just life in general.”

“But it is me,” is what Taemin gets out of that. “I make you feel lonely?”

Jonghyun slides his hand up Taemin’s spine to slip it in his hair, tugging him back so that they’re face-to-face once more. Taemin’s eyes widen, then narrow, traveling over his features, cataloguing every tiny detail. Maybe this is just how Jonghyun looked to him minutes ago, trying to figure out that face he’d never seen, but Jonghyun has no idea how he looks in this moment. Whatever face he’s making, only Taemin has seen. Jonghyun has hidden it even from himself.

“Not right now,” Jonghyun says painfully. “I’m not lonely right now.”

“But sometimes,” Taemin goes back to.

“It’s not you, Taeminnie, you don’t make me anything. It’s just how I am.”

For another eternity, Taemin just looks at him.

“I like you how you are. Even when it hurts, I still do.”

Jonghyun’s heart breaks. Just that little bit, cracks so tiny the pain feels like an echo of itself, but if he did the same thing to Taemin’s heart just now he has no right to even ask, “When was the last time I hurt you?”

“You know when.” Jonghyun’s breath catches in his chest, before Taemin’s mouth crimps into a secret smile. _That_ smile. The possibilities bloom under Jonghyun’s skin and rush in his blood and burst in his mouth, this sudden taste of desperation. The last time Jonghyun spanked him and Taemin kept telling him to hit him harder until his voice broke into cries, or that other time, the fourth in one night, when Taemin told him he didn’t need lube and got Jonghyun wet with his mouth and came untouched on his dick, telling him how big he was, and Taemin is telling him now, “You didn’t mean it like that, I know.”

Right. He didn’t. Taemin is so desperate for his dick he wants it anytime, anywhere, but who knows when the next time he’ll want Jonghyun’s words will be. The next time he’ll say so much with so little.

“I already know the answer, anyway.” Jonghyun leans in to kiss Taemin’s forehead, and Taemin makes this cute noise, same as when Jonghyun kisses his mouth. “I just did. I’m sorry.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Taemin says. “You’ll be able to tell when it is, I’m really ugly when I cry.”

As though Jonghyun hasn’t seen him before, even if it was only once or twice in twelve years. As though he hasn’t seen Taemin at all. “Not to me.”

Taemin kisses him, tracing his tongue over the corner of Jonghyun’s lips, then lifts away to press his fingertips to them, crooking them up.

“You just look like yourself.”

They talk about other things. Jonghyun’s day, everything Taemin ate and all the things he wanted to, the other songs Jonghyun is practicing, Roo and Adam and Eve, how the weather is too hot for May, if Taemin could visit Jonghyun at the venue tomorrow, if Jonghyun would like a blowjob in his car since he can’t bring him food, did Jonghyun set his alarm, the phase of the moon and the bruises on Taemin’s hips and the sound of Taemin’s laughter, until Jonghyun falls asleep before he thinks of the next thing to say.


End file.
